How to optimize your sites Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and grow customers without paying for Ads.

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This guide is a shorter post around setting up SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and driving more traffic to your site without buying ADs. In a nutshell, to have better SEO you need to jump some technical hurdles in order to drive more traffic to your site from search engines along with understanding your customer’s needs and making things easier for them.

I have blogged about this topics before but these posts are too long in reflection.

Facebook, Google, Bing and advertising agencies will recommend you set goals around growth and site traffic and pay for those goals to succeed (usually by advertisements).

Don’t get me wrong Advertising works but it is a competitive market, Online sites can easily setup the display of Ad’s on their site (my guide here Add Google AdWords to your WordPress blog, https://fearby.com/article/add-google-adwords-wordpress-blog/ ). You can buy physical billboard ad’s on the side of roads (e.g http://www.buythisspace.com.au/). I tried to enquire about the costs of a physical billboard but the agencies robot verification rejected my enquiry submission so I gave up. Advertising is buying peoples times and people now how to avoid ad’s and not interact with them (7 Marketing Lessons from Eye-Tracking Studies https://blog.kissmetrics.com/eye-tracking-studies/)

Do more of what works

Spoiler: This guide will recommend you do more of what works over buying millions of ad’s and hoping for new and engaged customers and customer growth.

I am a big fan of word of mouth over free/organic traffic over paid customers via advertising (Mostly because I am tight and realize advertising can be a bottomless pit). The single biggest thing you can do to have more organic traffic from search engines is run a modern and fast website, have valuable content and make it as easy for the customer as possible. This is why I moved my site and setup an SSL certificate (link to article).

Search engines like your site to be fast, updated frequently, have sitemaps to make their jobs easier and have an SSL certificate to keep the web safe etc.

Google, Bing and other search engines will not send traffic your way if you do not satisfy them that your site is liked or has valuable content. Google makes money from Google Analytics by helping people understand their site’s visitors then recommend you pay for ad’s to use on sites that have AdWords on their site ( WordPress to a new self-managed server away from CPanel).

Incoming links – Having incoming links to your site tell search engines that your site is popular.

Traffic Source types

Organic – An organic visitor to your site is one who found your site by searching something that was relevant to their search term and not by clicking on an advertisement.

Paid – A paid user is someone who has clicked an ad to come to your site.

Social – A social visitor is one who is known to come from a social media site, using social media sites like Twitter, Facebook or Instagram is a must to driving organic traffic (go where the people are).

Engagement

How engaged are your customers? Have you asked your customers recently what they value or appreciate about your business or product? Have you asked for feedback recently?

User Engagement Levels

None – Do you have landing pages that quickly inform customers of your products or services?

The more you know the better you can connect, Do set goals and as a minimum setup Google Analytics, SSL certificate and submit your site to search engines, then focus on a fast site that makes things simple for your customers.

I opened WordPress and went to Appearance then Editor and selected header.php and added the tracking code under the <head> HTML tag.

This tracking ID allows Google to generate stats from your visitors.

I was unable to update the file in WordPress until I set permissions in Ubuntu in (Read these guide to setup an Ubuntu Server on Vultr for as low as $2.5 a month of setup a $5 a month with Digital Ocean or AWS). I have guides on moving WordPress here or setting up WordPress from the command line here). If you update WordPress you may need to re add the tracking ID.

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sudo chmod666/www/wp-content/themes/twentyseventeen/header.php

I loaded my WordPress website and verified that the tracking code was loading in the HTML source. You can also embed the tracking code in static HTML websites.

After a few days, you can view your sites statistics. from the Googe Analytics home portal. This will allow you know when to publish, know how popular your content is, know what new content to create etc.

Page Hits

The best feature of Google Analytics is page hit information. To me, the total number of hits is less important than Avg. Time on Page and Bounce Rate.

Bounce Rate – The percentage or users who loaded your site and left after viewing the initial page.

Active Users – The total number of active users reading your site.

User Retention – The percentage of users who have returned to your site.

Device – The device (Desktop, tablet or mobile device) that was used to read your site.

Organic Search – The number of users who found your site via a search engine. Having a highly efficient SEO will see a higher Organic search percentage.

Sessions – The number of unique sessions that your users have accessed your site.

Direct – The times a user has directly typed your website URL (or have visited your site in incognito/privacy mode).

Referral – The percentage or know referrals from other websites.

Social – Known number of visits to our site from social media platforms.

Overview

You can watch in real-time users accessing your site. This is important when you send out mailing list to users when new content is posted, will 1,000 visitors take down your site? Are you posting at the right time for your sites visitors timezone?

Audience Overview

This report will tell you a lot about who and where people are visiting your site form and what language they speak, OS they use, what browser they use and what city they are from.

Google Analytics allows you to drill down on most captured data.

I can see Apple devices are the most popular mobile devices accessing my site (but mobile devices in total only take up 12 % of my site’s traffic).

The User Flow report is a great way to see how people interact with your site (where they come from, what they do and where they drop out).

Google Analytics has a handy page speed tool that you can use to identify what you need to do to speed up your site.

Google Analytics have goals that allow you to set targets to meet. Usually, Google encourages you to assign a monetary value to a goal then suggest you buy Google Ad’s to achieve these goals (this is why Google Analytics is free). Read my guide on setting up Google AdWords on your WordPress blog.

It is easy to deploy servers to the cloud within a few minutes, you can have a cloud-based server that you (or others can use). ubuntu has a great guide on setting up basic security issues but what do you need to do.

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If you do not secure your server expect it to be hacked into. Below are tips on securing your cloud server.

Always use update software, malicious users can detect what software you use with sites like shodan.io (or use port scan tools) and then look for weaknesses from well-published lists (e.g WordPress, Windows, MySQL, node, LifeRay, Oracle etc). People can even use Google to search for login pages or sites with passwords in HTML (yes that simple). Once a system is identified by a malicious user they can send automated bots to break into your site (trying millions of passwords a day) or use tools to bypass existing defences (Security researcher Troy Hunt found out it’s child’s play).

tip: Download manual antivirus update definitions. If you only have a 512MB server your update may fail and you may want to stop fresh claim/php/nginx and mysql before you update to ensure the antivirus definitions update. You can move this to a con job and set this to update at set times over daemon to ensure updates happen.